Negotiating Work, Family, and Identity among Long-Haul Christian Truck Drivers by Upton Rebecca L.;

Author:Upton, Rebecca L.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

In this chapter I introduce some of the narratives of men with respect to how they think of themselves as sexual and religious individuals and how those identities are both supportive of and at times, at odds with their identities as men, fathers, and workers. As Pete Stryker notes above, much of the construction of masculinity comes from experience with others, with the socialization process and is constituted through multiple sources and voices. For many in this book, masculinity is constituted through the actual trucks themselves, too; the literal embodiment of masculinity becomes evident in the individual as well as vehicle body. Pete is unique in many ways in that unlike many of the men with whom I spoke and rode, he spent a good deal of time reflecting upon the potential messages that his two sons received when it came to the construction of masculinity. As Pete continued,

I have two boys, right now their masculine role models run the gambit [laughs] where we just had Superfriends, Lee Marvin and his bionic body, they have everything from the good ole GI Joe to GI Joes of different colors, they see Spongebob as heroic and they don’t think twice about Ken and Barbie . . . when I was a kid you definitely did not play with Ken and there was always something suspect about that doll . . . today it’s not a non-issue, just a bigger range in popular culture and I’m glad for that. The hard part for my wife and myself . . . we have always been pretty devout Christians and yet the more I drove for the [Christian trucking] company, the harder it was for me and really for us, to reconcile a message about a God who was not all that benevolent or broad-minded, at least on the surface and in the literature. I think in practice you hardly met a guy who wasn’t aware of these tensions and the need to be a more nineties kind of guy, but if you just listened to the messages I think it’d be confusing and that’s not what we wanted to tell our boys about how to be men.

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